The Last Holdout of Basic Favicon Decency

Technology is constantly evolving—to serve you better. Or simply to serve better. The distinction, as always, lies in who pays for the serving.

Let’s play a game: here are some browser tabs. Find Safari:

Show the GIFs

Try the test yourself

Have you noticed something? I’m not talking about the spinning dots; those are really hard not to notice. The less obvious point is that Safari stubbornly refuses to spin its favicon.

“It’s clearly a bug,” thought some naïve, natural-born asshole¹, and duly filed a WebKit bug report. It made my day. I literally cackled—which, unlike most uses of LOL, means that I actually laughed out loud.

Just put yourself in the shoes of those poor, hard-working site owners, will ya? You had the audacity to rudely decline their website’s offer to send notifications through Apple’s Notification Center. But you, of course, really need the spam more than anything else you might be trying to do at that moment. The conclusion is easy and obvious for them, decency-wise. So let them draw animated attention-grabbers! Surprise: technology has evolved to do just that. As if it had heard the market’s demand.

Of course, these won’t be merely tasteless, old-school, dumb animated GIFs spinning a “NOW FREE!” ad purely to steal your attention—oh no! This is sophisticated technology that kicks in only when there are real updates that you, as we all know, really, really need, and draws tasteful little red circles with numbers—the kind you know and love from pretty much everywhere. And anyway, if you tried to sue Google over Chrome foisting animated favicons on us, you’d lose. Chrome merely allows a static favicon to be replaced eight times a second. Those are moving pictures, Your Honor—not a movie.

You wouldn’t dare sue Mozilla; it’s a nonprofit lamb among evil corporate wolves. It simply does not want to deprive developers of their freedom to write anything they please in their code.

Only Apple, the evilest of them all, has not yet failed its users in the face of these demands from the advertising industry. Why? Specifically because it is evil. It counts its money, like any good evildoer. And unlike the organizations behind “free” Chrome and Firefox, it gets its money directly from you when you buy an iPhone or a MacBook, rather than through a cut of ad revenue. For now, at least…

P.S. I was unable to find any way to disable dynamic favicon changes in Chrome. Firefox’s situation in this regard is downright comical: the request for a way to disable animated favicons has been gathering dust for the past 24 years.

P.P.S. “Why do you use a Mac? It’s so expensive!” Well, precisely.